Last week at the blog Dynamic Ecologyit was argued that natural selection behaves like a “risk-averse” money investor. That is, assuming that fitness varies over time (due to e.g. changing environmental variables or other selective factors), natural selection favors situations in which the mean fitness is maximized while the variance is minimized. The idea is explained in this short paper by Orr (2007), whose goal was to explain previous findings (Gillespie, 1973) intuitively. This presumes that knowledge of investor behavior is commonplace, but for my money, an examination of the math details and assumptions is what’s really needed.

Discussing science on the internet can be interesting at times, even on Twitter, which seems to have been designed specifically to foster misunderstanding by way of brevity. Here are two examples from my week.

Early in the week, Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist in Alaska, put up a global map of monthly precipitation variability:
Brian said the metric graphed constitutes the percentiles of a chi-square goodness-of-fit test comparing average monthly precipitation (P) against uniform monthly P. I then made the point that he might consider using the Poisson distribution of monthly P as the reference departure point instead, as this was the more correct expectation of the “no variation” situation. Brian responded that there was no knowledge, or expectation, regarding the dispersion of data, upon which to base such a decision. That response made me think a bit, and I then realized that I was thinking of the issue in terms of variation in whatever driving processes lead to precipitation measured at monthly scales, whereas Brian was thinking strictly in terms of the observations themselves–the data as they are, without assumptions. So, my suggestion was only “correct” if one is thinking about the issue the way I was. Then, yes, the Poisson distribution around the overall monthly mean, will describe the expected variation of a homogeneous, random process, sampled monthly. But Brian was right in that there is no necessary reason to assume, apriori, that this is in fact the process that generated the data in various locations.

The second interchange was more significant, and worrisome. Green Party candidate for President, physician Jill Stein, stated “12.3M Americans could lose their homes due to a sea level rise of 9ft by 2050. 100% renewable energy by 2030 isn’t a choice, it’s a must.” This was followed by criticisms, but not just by the expected group but also by some scientists and activists who are concerned about climate change. One of them, an academic paleoecologist, Jacquelyn Gill, stated “I’m a climate scientist and this exceeds even extreme estimates“, and later “This is NOT correct by even the most extreme estimates“. She later added some ad-hominem barbs such as “That wasn’t a scientist speaking, it was a lawyer” and “The point of Stein’s tweet was to court green voters with a cherry-picked figure“. And some other things that aren’t worth repeating really.

OK so what’s the problem here? Shouldn’t we be criticizing exaggerations of science claims when they appear in the mass culture? Sure, fine, to the extent that you are aware of them and have the time and expertise to do so. But that ain’t not really the point here, which is instead something different and more problematic IMO. Bit of a worm can in fact.

Steve Bloom has been following the climate change debate for (at least) several years, and works as hard to keep up on the science as any non-scientist I’ve seen. He saw Gill’s tweets and responded, that no, Stein’s statement did not really go so far beyond the extreme scientific estimates. He did not reference some poor or obsolete study by unknown authors from 25 years ago, but rather a long, wide ranging study by James Hansen and others, only a few months old, one that went through an impressive and unique open review process (Peter Thorne was one of the reviewers, and critical of several major aspects of the paper, final review here, and summary of overall review experience here). Their work does indeed place such a high rate of rise within the realm of defensible consideration, depending on glacier and ice sheet dynamics in Greenland and Antarctica, for which they incorporate into their modeling some recent findings on the issue. So, Jill Stein is not so off-the-wall in her comments after all, though she may have exaggerated slightly, and I don’t know where she got the “12.3M homes” figure.

The point is not that James Hansen is the infallible king of climate science, and therefore to be assumed correct. Hanson et al. might be right or they might be wrong, I don’t know. [If they’re right we’re in big trouble]. I wasn’t aware of the study until Steve’s tweeted link, and without question it will take some serious time and work to work through the thing, even just to understand what they claim and how they got there, which is all I can expect to achieve. If I get to it at all that is.

One point is that some weird process has developed, where all of a sudden a number of scientists sort of gang up on some politician or whatever who supposedly said some outrageous thing or other. It’s not scientist A criticizing public person B this week and then scientist C criticizing public person D the next week–it’s a rather predictable group all ganging up on one source, at once. To say the least, this is suspicious behavior, especially given the magnitude of the problems I see within science itself. I do wonder how much of this is driven by climate change “skeptics” complaining about the lack of criticisms of extreme statements in the past.

To me, the bigger problem is that these criticisms are rarely aimed at scientists, but rather at various public persons. Those people are not immune to criticism, far from it. But in many cases, and clearly in this one, things being claimed originate from scientists themselves, in publications, interviews or speeches. For the most part, people don’t just fabricate claims, they derive them from science sources (or what they consider to be such), though they certainly may exaggerate them. If you don’t think the idea of such a rapid rise is tenable, fine…then take Hanson et al. to the cleaners, not Jill Stein. But, unless you are intimately familiar with the several issues involving sea level rise rates, especially ice melt, then you’ve got some very long and serious work ahead of you before you’re in any position to do so. This stuff is not easy or simple and the authors are no beginners or lightweights.

The second issue involves the whole topic of consensus, which is a very weird phenomenon among certain climate scientists (not all, by any means). As expected, when I noted that Stein was indeed basically referencing Hanson et al., I was hit with the basic argument (paraphrased) “well they’re outside of the consensus (and/or IPCC) position, so the point remains”. Okay, aside from the issues of just exactly how this sacred consensus is to be defined anyway… yeah, let’s say they are outside of it, so what? The “consensus position” now takes authority over evidence and reasoning, modeling and statistics, newly acquired data etc., that is, over the set of tools we have for deciding which, of a various set of claims, is most likely correct? Good luck advancing science with that approach, and especially in cases where questionable or outright wrong studies have formed at least part of the basis of your consensus. It’s remarkably similar to Bayesian philosophy–they’re going to force the results from prior studies to be admitted as evidence, like it or not, independent of any assessment of their relative worth. Scientific ghoulash.

And yes, such cases do indeed exist, even now–I work on a couple of them in ecology, and the whole endeavor of trying to clarify issues and correct bad work can be utterly maddening when you have to deal with that basic mindset.

So, without getting into the reasons, I’m reading through the entry in the International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science on “Statistical Fallacies: Misconceptions and Myths”, written by one “Shlomo Sawilowsky, Professor, Wayne State University, Detroit MI, USA”. Within the entry, 20 such fallacies are each briefly described.

Sawilowsky introduces the topic by stating:

Compilations and illustrations of statistical fallacies, misconceptions, and myths abound…The statistical faux pas is appealing, intuitive, logical, and persuasive, but demonstrably false. They are uniformly presented based on authority and supported based on assertion…these errors spontaneously regenerate every few years, propagating in peer reviewed journal articles…and dissident literature. Some of the most egregious and grievous are noted below.

Great, let’s get after it then.

He then gets into his list, which proceeds through a set of +/- standard types of issues, including misunderstanding of the Central Limit Theorem, Type I errors, p values, effect sizes and etc. Up comes item 14:

14. Chi-square
(a) We live in a Chi-square society due to political correctness that dictates equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. The test of independence version of this statistic is accepted sans voire dire by many legal systems as the single most important arbiter of truth, justice, and salvation. It has been asserted that any statistical difference between (often even nonrandomly selected) samples of ethnicity, gender, or other demographic as compared with (often even inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated) census data is primae faciea evidence of institutional racism, sexism, or other ism. A plaintiff allegation that is supportable by a significant Chi-square is often accepted by the court (judges and juries) praesumptio iuris et de iure. Similarly, the goodness of fit version of this statistic is also placed on an unwarranted pedestal.

Bingo Shlomo!!

Now this is exactly what I want from my encyclopedia entries: a strictly apolitical, logical description of the issue at hand. In fact, I hope to delve deep into other statistical writings of Dr. Sawilowsky to gain, hopefully, even better insights than this one.

Postscript: I’m not really bent out of shape on this, and would indeed read his works (especially this one: Sawilowsky, S. (2003) Deconstructing arguments from the case against hypothesis testing. J. Mod. Appl. Stat. Meth. 2(2):467-474). I can readily overlook ideologically driven examples like this to get at the substance I’m after, but I do wonder how a professional statistician worked that into an encyclopedia entry.

I note also that the supposed “screening fallacy” popular on certain blogs is not included in the list…and I’m not the least bit surprised.